For your sife project, it would be nice to see a preview of what you're sending

Edit: I saw the small link to examples :)

I haven’t tried it on desktop but on mobile, the “infinite” view is quite nice.

Same here, the scroll behavior in Infinite View is really ...

Standard Ebooks has a database of public domain oil paintings for use as book covers. SE is strict about copyright clearance and requires either scans of a copyright‐expired publication containing the painting, or an explicit statement from a reputable museum that the work is CC0. Here’s an entry I contributed:

https://standardebooks.org/artworks/arthur-i-keller/calvin-c...

Search for public records about the image. If you can confirm the author is dead for at least 70 years (in case the author originally held the copyright) and the work is at least 120 years old or was published more than 95 years ago (in case this was work for hire) you are good

For younger works other conditions might make a work public domain, like the work being created by a US federal government employee as part of their duties

Just contact the original author. You may need to pay extra for the Medium.

Unfortunately, the infinite scroll page doesn't work very well... but this one scrolls normal and doesn't open random pages, and it seems to be the same stream of picutures: https://pdimagearchive.org/galleries/all/random/desc

I had no trouble with it once I realized it wanted me to drag the border area.

On desktop Firefox, if you scroll while the mouse is on the top half of the first row of images, it goes very wonky.

To be specific, this is US public domain only (which is globally non-standard).

I know this is a joke, but just as a note, in some european countries, the person who digitized the artwork may have a copyright. It varries a bit by country.

Nothing is globally standard.

On the other hand they do allow search by century and very little from the 19th (and none earlier) century is still in copyright anywhere.

There is a possible problem with countries where a photographer can have copyright over their photograph of an earlier work. Again, there is not global standard.

Exactly. The site mentions that and some other problems, and just disclaimers their liability. One problem I didn't see mentioned directly is that some venues have additional bureaucratic rules.

For example, I saw a writer-artist complain that they couldn't show the big ebook store proof that they'd licensed the art for their cover, since they painted it themself, and there was no documentation licensing it to them.

So one could use practical advice from someone who's figured out the rules, and has the battle scars, like: "With public domain art, just make sure you do X and avoid Y; otherwise, there's a 50% chance that a random copyright check the first week will result in your book temporarily being shadowbanned, and you won't get the crucial early sales while the algorithm is trialing exposure of your book in searches and categories, and then the algorithm will pretty much never show your book to anyone ever again."

>There is a possible problem with countries where a photographer can have copyright over their photograph of an earlier work.

To be specific, Germany is one of the few countries where this applies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality

It's an absolutely stupid idea IMO.

Fwiw, i think wikimedia commons has some really good help pages on what is and is not public domain:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Public_domain

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Freedom_of_panora...

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Reuse_of_PD-Art_p...

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:De_minimis

Of course sometimes its just a risk trade off, and depends more on how the publisher feels then what the actual rules are.

What I'm wondering is -- although an item would be found to be legally considered public domain in all applicable jurisdictions when examined by law clerk -- what are the practical rules for passing copyright clearance checks/challenges by Amazon, Kobo, etc. for public domain art.

You don't want a book's carefully choreographed launch sabotaged by various companies' Kafkaesque bureaucratic processes, while you're trying to finesse the algorithm and the publicity you've scheduled.

(I should've said upfront that I know a bit about public domain and copyright law as a layperson. And I also know that I can't necessarily point a CSR to law surveys if something gets flagged. I need to know the "do X and avoid Y" that is proven to actually work smoothly with all these companies' ideas of "copyright clearance", so that I hopefully never have to talk to a CSR.)